Chris Granger/The Times-PicayuneExamples of truly medium rare meat have become rare at modern, chef-driven restaurants. This steak from Charlie's Steakhouse is an exception.

I've been dining out even more than usual in recent weeks as I face down my fast-approaching deadlines for the Lagniappe's Fall Dining Guide. It will include 100 mini reviews of restaurants, all of which I will have dined at within the past year, most within the last four months. The late-stage, deadline-crashing meals tend to be predominantly at the city's upscale, chef-driven restaurants; they're the ones eligible for my annual ranking of the Top Ten restaurants in New Orleans. It's tradition for me to futz with that list until the guys who run the printing presses grow impatient.

I have been having some fabulous meals. But one thing grates: Why is it that chefs persist interpreting an order of medium rare meat as a desire to eat something that's barely dead?

There is a lot of lamb, duck breast and steak out there, and for my entire professional life I have been ordering them medium rare. It is the temperature that best shows off red meat's flavor and succulence -- or at least that was the case back when medium rare was still medium rare.

I'm not sure when it happened, but at some point in time -- I'm going to say the mid- to late-90s -- the collective meaning of the words "medium rare" ceased to be self evident. Today, I don't really expect for there to be anything medium about my medium rare meat. In fact, rare is often too strong a word to describe the carpaccio chefs often try to pass off as cooked meat today.

My problem isn't that rareness makes me queasy. It doesn't. (In fact, I welcome the tendency to undercook when it comes to tuna and salmon.) My issue is how many chefs seem to have lost sight of the fact that meat benefits from a more than a theoretical exposure to heat. Cooking firms the flesh and adds extra dimensions to its flavor and texture. Too rare meat is squishy, so much so it can make soft side dishes -- risotto, polenta, mashed potatoes -- seem like solid ground. Cooking is also, technically speaking, a chef's job.

Steakhouses, I've found, are more apt to respect traditional notions of doneness. The chefs at the Argentine steakhouse La Boca aren't afraid to keep their meat on the fire, and still they manage to churn out juicy, flavorful medium rare steaks with a deep shades of red at their centers. I also recently ordered a medium rare ribeye at Dickie Brennan's Steakhouse and, somewhat to my surprise, received a medium rare ribeye.

That said, such steak encounters have become rare, and I have officially had it. Until chefs cease to view rareness as proof of their virility, I'm ordering medium.